Gallery

Ripe (2017)

A short film by Lisa Kusanagi

"Ripe" is part of Kusanagi's ongoing multi-disciplinary art series "Psychosomatic Erosion" which examines the politics of women's bodies as they are hyper-sexualized in media and culture--bodies on the front lines of pleasure-selling industries. Commercials and porn industries shape, distort, and dehumanize our sexuality, sense of identity, desires, sexual norms, ideas of pleasure, and relationships. This aesthetic phenomenon affects our body image across the spectrum of female-identified and gender nonconforming bodies. The work pushes for greater awareness: What are the consequences of this phenomenon?

This is Kusanagi's latest dance work choreographed for students of Universidad de las Americas Puebla in Mexico, in which she explores and investigates complex sociopolitical realities through the lens of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s quote “Liberation opens up new relationships of power, which have to be controlled by practice of liberty.”

According to the research, there are 9 different types of intelligence; naturalistic, musical, logical-mathematical, existential, interpersonal, bodily-kinesthetic, linguistic, intra-personal, and spatial. We question how can other intelligence besides linguistic and logical-mathematical, which are considered the “intellectual” in most academic institutions, gain more respect and recognition. Are there any other and more intelligence exist? So often we feel our aesthetics, ideas, imaginations, and minds are colonized by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. We reject colonization of our imaginations. Because our perceptions and imaginations are reality. We must de-colonize our imaginations, in order to think and create freely in our own logical senses."itsy bitsy" has been screened across the United States (17 states) and at festivals and venues in Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Chile, United Kingdom, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Albania, Kenya, China, and Indonesia. It has received many awards including First Place in pre-professional category at 2016 Utah Dance Film Festival (UT) and Audience Choice Award at the 2015 40 NORTH Dance Film Festival (CA). Critic Megan Stevenson wrote, "The sisters, in canary yellow lipstick, performed delicate finger dances in a mushroom forest, sipped through novelty straws, carefully stepped over eyeballs on a bark floor, and played mushrooms like musical wine glasses. ...In this film (and often in the world), sometimes weirdness is paradise" (Seattledances.com). The film has been screened in 15 countries at over 30 festivals, 5 universities, 3 galas, and many venues including AMC Theatres, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, and the JW Marriott Hotel Los Angeles LED billboards.

You don't understand. It's like someone's squeezing your heart. It's like you're trapped in a bottomless swamp. It's like you're a monochrome object in a world full of color. Hurts? Not only that. It really aches. Deeply, gradually, ...endlessly."Let me weep over my cruel fate and sigh for my lost freedom. May the pain shatter the chains of my torments just out of mercy." - Gorge F. Handel